In this sixth novel from the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Quarrel & Quandary, Cynthia Ozick retraces the plot of Henry James' The Ambassadors but reverses the meaning. At the center of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold ever since her brief marriage. When her estranged brother asks her to travel to Europe to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of his family, and even, after all these years, her ex-husband.

"An absorbing achievement ... a nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called 'the real thing'."—NYTBR